Question about gigabit adapter in a Proliant using Linux

[Kevin Joubert]

I have a customer running RHAS v2.1 on a Proliant DL380 G3.

There is download for an "approved" driver for the gigabit NIC that replaces the standard "tg3.o" driver with a "bcm5700.o" driver.

We are having trouble getting that driver to work, but the original tg3 driver seems to work fine.

Can we safely stick with that? What, if any, are the advantages of the bcm5700 driver?

-K.

[Steven E. Protter]

1) If the original driver works and provides Gigabit speeds, why are you tyring to change it? Is this a bug fix or what?

Many will disagree with me, but if there is no compelling reason to upgrade a driver leave it alone.

Compelling reasons:
Security problems.
Performance issues.
Standards compliance.
Unexplained problems.

Not so compelling reasons:
I'm bored.
I want to see how it works.

In those cases, I find something more productive to do.

I stay as current as possible on patches and kernel configuration.

But, when the latest Red Hat Kernel wouldn't boot on my production server(even after testing out very nicely), I back it out and happily stayed with the old one.



P

[Kevin Joubert]

I guess thats what I am asking... is there a compelling reason to change that anyone here knows of?

The documentation doesn't really speak to it, but does this driver "update" correct any of these compelling reasons you mention?

-Kevin

[Jonas Back_2]

I'm not a Linuxadministrator but takes care of our LAN and is now investigating teaming network adapters on our server (we run that on Windows already - but not our Linux boxes).

Doesn't the bcm5700 driver make it possible to team your adapters that the original driver doesn't?